


aunque me estrelle entre las rocas

by Lire_Casander



Series: queda en manos de mi memoria [1]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Child Abuse, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 12:15:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18468769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lire_Casander/pseuds/Lire_Casander
Summary: five times alex manes went to war, and the one time he found peace





	aunque me estrelle entre las rocas

**Author's Note:**

> I favorited [this tumblr post](http://myrandomfandom.tumblr.com/post/183658420233/all-i-want-is-for-alex-to-tell-michael-i-went-to) by [myrandomfandom](http://myrandomfandom.tumblr.com) with this wonderful line _all I want is for alex to tell michael ‘i went to war and saw terrible things being done to people and yet all my nightmares are still of_ you _getting hurt’_ , and I just had to write it. How it became this monster of a story, I don’t know. 
> 
> Fantastic [Shenanigans](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shenanigans) had a look over this and put her approved stamp on it. Thanks for your neverending support and help!
> 
> I do not own the characters or the lines you might recognize, they’re all The CW and the _Roswell NM_ writers. Title and excerpts from Fito & Fitipaldis’ _Entre la espada y la pared_ , which I do not own either. Translations for the excerpts in the notes by the end.

**one. lo contrario de vivir es no arriesgarse**

There are memories he tries to suppress, only for them to come haunt him at night when he’s all alone in the toolshed right behind his house. Some are tearful, some are breathtaking, some are heartbreaking, and then there’s the happy ones – and they are the most destructive of them all.

When he’s lying on top of the makeshift bunk, staring absently at the posters Maria and Liz helped him stick to the walls, he remembers his mother’s scent from when he was a little kid and he used to hide in the laundry room for hours, way before she left them – _him_ – behind. He remembers the songs she used to sing to him, the way she twirled around when music blasted through the speakers in the living room, the joy she imprinted in every chord she managed to extract from old out of tune guitars.

The summer they built the tree house everything went to hell – his father discovering the truth about his youngest and deciding to beat the gay out of Alex wasn’t one of his fondest memories, but it is still engraved in the edges of his consciousness – and now here he is, seventeen, nursing yet another headache and staring into nothingness as he replays the events of the afternoon in his mind, thinking whether he would have got a different outcome had he not confronted his father once again.

Things have been spiraling out of control for months now, and with graduation approaching at the speed of lighting his life has become a jumbled mess of studying hours with Liz, sneaking away to smoke joints with Maria, getting the occasional detention for being obviously rebellious at school, and feeling oddly out of place when his two closest friends ramble about their crushes, knowing he might not be allowed to even have one if he wants to survive at home. Nevertheless, it’s his tendency to speak up when not allowed what’s giving him the toughest of times at home – if there has ever been a nicer time at the household since his mother left them at the mercy of the monster.

The youngest of his older brothers is leaving for Lebanon, and his father has decided to throw a farewell party, but Alex isn’t feeling like it. Instead, he’s holed up in the toolshed, his father’s words etched in the corners of his mind like a mantra, _Robert will become a hero out there, a real Manes man_ , and the knowledge that he will never live up to his father’s expectations has never been a burden until now – until he’s seen the pride in those vacuous eyes, the love he would have killed to feel directed at him just once. He really wants to be someone by his father’s standards, but he’s so used to always disappoint him that this time he couldn’t even stop himself.

He’s all but spat nonsense about how this never-ending war was something neither of them had signed up for – especially not him, who was never going to enlist – while his father was around getting the last details for Robert’s party, so he has caught his words.

He could say the outcome wasn’t pretty, but that wouldn’t cover half of it.

One finger traces up the irregular path of buttons on his skin – marks left by belts and tools throughout the last years. His hands finds its way up to the base of his head, where lays the last addition to his personal collection of war wounds, a purpling bruise in the shape of a hand where five fingers have pressed forcefully to pull him out of his dream life and into the reality of the monstrous vindictive human being his father has become. It hurts like hell just to think about it, and he should be doing something to reduce the size of the lump, but he can’t bring himself to care. He ends up staying the night in the toolshed, no Tylenol handy, and when he wakes up the lump is nowhere near gone, as isn’t the throbbing ache in the back of his head.

Despite the numbness and the headache, he sits up after a moment and takes some time to breathe in and out, balance his nausea and calm his insides. He has to go to school anyway, so he heads off to the main house – luckily not crossing paths with his father, who must be already at the base – and changes clothes. Piercings and choker back on, a bit of eyeliner and a ton of faked self-assurance, and he’s ready to hit the halls with his best bogus smile.

All the way to school he tries to focus on the good in his life, and when the trip down to memory lane takes him to his mother and the way she played guitar so carelessly, he decides to skip classes and go for the music room to haul up the guitar he’s left there for practice. Only, it isn’t there when he enters the room, and he searches for it everywhere – the bleachers, the lockers, the changing rooms – until he overhears someone saying they found that freak of Guerin sneaking out of the music room with a guitar that obviously wasn’t his. Fuming, Alex starts his personal quest to regain what’s his by right.

Things don’t go that well for starters, though. 

Michael Guerin is playing his guitar whilst sitting in the back of his truck, parked a little farther from the school’s parking lot. Alex’s patience snaps in half a second.

“What the hell, Guerin?” he scolds him, snatching the instrument from the other boy’s hands. “You can't just steal instruments from the music room. This is mine.”

“I was gonna return it,” Guerin answers, and after a beat he adds, as if a second thought, “and-and it was out of tune, so you're welcome.”

There is something in the way Michael Guerin doesn’t look him straight in the eye, as if he holds some big secret that could spill the moment he makes eye contact. Alex glances at his back, eyeing a sleeping bag and some blankets behind Guerin. “You really do live in your truck,” he ponders, not accusingly, but more matter of factly.

It seems the other boy takes it as an attack rather than some chit chat, for all he grits out is “all the rumors about you true?”, which makes Alex cringe. Whatever rumors Valenti has managed to get going about him – his sexuality, his latest detention – cannot match the truth he is too hiding behind closed doors.

“You're kinda lucky, you know,” he finally says in a sigh. “Things at my house suck.” He takes a sharp inhale and steps away, but it’s not far enough before he changes his mind and offers, in a soft voice that carries with the wind to Guerin’s ears, “There's this toolshed out behind my house. It's warm and I go there when things get bad.”

The offer stands for Guerin to take it, but Alex doesn’t want to be pushing – he doesn’t even understand what’s gotten into him to offer his own sanctuary to a boy he doesn’t really know at all – so he falters briefly before setting a cruising course back to school.

When he finally walks away, he feels a weight off his shoulders, and the ache in his head has receded some, his soul finding a quiet peace he hasn’t known in years.

**two. quizás podamos ver el sol de vez en cuando**

The moment the hammer stops breaking bones, Alex’s personal inferno begins.

Later on, he will remember this instant while lying on his back on a filthy battlefield halfway across the world, in another desert, in another life. But for now, all he can do is try to forget how much it hurts to watch Michael reduced to a puddle of blood and anguish, even if there aren’t any tears.

He doesn’t register when his father throws Michael out, hand bleeding a trail on the concrete floor, for he is too engrossed in realizing that, once they are all alone, his father might decide Alex is far a better punching ball than Michael was.

He isn’t mistaken.

The building up of the upcoming blow breaks him more than the actual hit when it comes. His father has left the hammer back onto the table and approaches him bare-handed, but Alex knows better than to keep his hopes up – his father is known for being able to beat a pulp out of him with just his hands, not leaving any mark visible while his clothes are on. The blow reaches him right in the stomach, making him turn over himself and gasp in pain. He resists the urge to kneel down on the floor when the punches keep coming, but his father manages to lift him up with a new blow and he pins Alex to the column once again with a bruised hand, fingers closing up against his throat and Alex can’t breathe properly.

He is scared, struggling for air and kicking his legs out because that’s the only thing he knows – fighting to survive yet another whack, trying to come back with something, _anything_ , that might stop the beating. “Please,” he manages to get through the hand choking him.

“A real Manes man doesn’t plead,” his father barks out, but he lets go. He sweeps a finger over his bottom lip, looking down at Alex as the teenager slips down to the floor. “You will have to learn the hard way how to become the man you’re supposed to be. To learn respect and obedience when I so obviously couldn’t teach you how to.”

Alex doesn’t understand a thing, but it seems the speech is all his father has to say, for he turns hot on his heels and leaves him heaving on the floor, closing the door at his back. When he hears the click of the lock, he finally understands.

His father has locked him inside the toolshed – no water, no food, _nothing_ – to teach him a lesson. A lesson that might make or break him. He closes his eyes and prays to a God he doesn’t believe in to end his suffering.

All he gets is a whole week in lockdown – with the occasional bread and water thrown his way along with a good chunk of bigotry and blows – before his father enters the room again, this time effectively locking the door from the inside, searching for tools with one hand while the other rests almost carefree on his belt buckle. “Have you learned anything while you’ve been here?”

Alex shivers. He doesn’t like the sound of that voice, the snarl, the utter _hate_ oozing from it. He wonders if anyone has missed him, he wonders whether anyone will if his father ends him right here and now – whether his brothers might miss him. Whether _Michael_ might.

The hammer hits the wall, closer to where his head is resting against it, and he has to stop thinking and start fighting for his life.

“Tomorrow you will enlist,” his father spits when all is said and done, and Alex is crying over his own blood spilled on the floor. It has been the first time his father has made him bleed – never in a life worth of abuse has Alex bled from any of his father’s injuries. Now he has a split lip, a blood running nose and a bruise blooming in his left cheek to prove him wrong. Still, he sticks his chin out and tries his best to look his father in the eye when he replies.

“Never.”

“Oh, but you will,” his father smiles scaringly. “You know you will, or whatever happened to that astray kid you managed to take under your sick spell will be nothing compared to what a night back at the base might do to him.”

The threat lingers between them while his father cleans up the tools he’s been using and washes the drying blood off his hands. He is at military stance, and Alex knows he has completely lost his mind. And those are the worst – powerful, completely nuts military men who know without a single doubt that they have the world in their hands.

Without really understanding the gist of it, he knows he _loves_ Michael. They haven’t talked that much, they haven’t really done anything other than connecting in levels his poor battered head doesn’t comprehend. But he knows, deep down, that he would do anything to keep Michael apart from the psycho his father has become in the past years. There are things he can’t undo, but there are others he can prevent.

With the little strength he has left, he nods silently. That seems to please his father enough to exit the toolshed without locking the door at his back this time. Alex takes a deep hurting breath and moves to sit up against the column. He might even have a broken rib, but he can’t be completely sure without going to the hospital – which he isn’t so keen on doing. There are tears fighting their way out of his eyes and suiciding against the floor, but he doesn’t care anymore.

He’s let his father strip him from who he is in order to keep Michael safe. If that isn’t the definition of sacrifice a real Manes man has to do in his life, he doesn’t know what else can be. To him it doesn’t matter that it isn’t a sacrifice for his country, because it is enough sacrifice to last him a lifetime, and then some.

He straightens up, lip and nose still bleeding, and lets out a sigh laced with the hurt coming from his chest. If he goes, Michael will be safe – he will go to college, become more of a genius than he already is, and own the world. And for that, Alex has to do some readjustments. Starting with – _no more Michael_ , he thinks to himself, _just Guerin will have to do._

And as he switches the names in his mind, he decides to purposefully ignore the pain in his soul telling him that, out of the bad decisions he’s come to make over the years, keeping _him_ out of his life is by far the worst ever.

He’ll learn to live with that, he’s sure.

He has to.

**three. sin dormirme te soñé**

No matter how far he gets from Roswell, there is something always pulling him back to the place. At first he didn’t understand what it was, but lately he has been having these really vivid dreams where he enters a room full of people – the friends and family he’s chosen over the years – all gathered together in what looks suspiciously like the UFO museum back at his hometown. There is always one face standing out in the sea of greetings, but he actively chooses to oversee it for what it is because, if he falters in his resolve, then everything he’s fought for will turn to ashes.

It’s been eight years since he left Roswell. The first two were bad, he remembers – under his father’s observant eyes, he got the worst part of training, and then the worst of destinations, until he proved himself to his superiors and slowly became a codebreaker with some reputation, finally casting himself out of his father’s shadow. That slow burn has taken him where he is right now, even though he isn’t really sure he still dislikes his situation as much as he did when he was eighteen.

The Air Force is the only adult life he’s ever known, his father made sure of that. Surprisingly, that kind of life hasn’t been so bad on him – he’s good at what he does, and he has his share of friends among the different ranks, even when he outranked many of them in his quest to becoming the best Manes man of them all. So he thinks he must be grateful to his father, but he can’t quite come to terms with the idea that finding out something he loves to do came with a high price to pay – leaving behind what made him happy, the one he loved and who makes – _made_ – him happy.

For, in these past eight years, he hasn’t been happy, not a single second.

First, having to hide his true inclinations to his squadron took half his energy. He had never been in the closet before, not since he had found out – rather later than his father – that he was into guys, but the Air Force had a tight grip on what was good and what wasn’t. Being a gay Airman would have earned him only despair. So he hid, and when the time came to show off his true colors, he was so used to being someone he didn’t recognize in the mirror that he didn’t even think of coming out to his closest friends.

And here they are now – Manes, Mason and Parsons, all stuck together in a desert so far away from everything they’ve ever known, and still oddly familiar. They are kept a bit separated from the crossed fire, what with them being the intel needed to drop down all the missiles they know the bad guys have hidden somewhere. 

He is typing like crazy on his laptop, battered and turned upside down so many times he’s lost count. Parsons got the first guard, so he is outside when the first hissing sounds begin to distract him. 

“Parsons, what’s that?” he calls out, eyes never leaving the screen. He is almost there, he can sense it, the beeping getting closer and closer until he realizes it doesn’t come from the counting in his screen.

It’s outside the tent he’s currently sitting in, with Mason by his side watching every single movement he makes.

“Parsons!” he cries out again, this time frantically. The hissing is getting closer, and Parsons enters the tent, wild gaze and shaking.

“Run!”

There is no time. When Alex stands up, trying to salvage whatever he can from his surroundings – the laptops, the cameras, everything that can be sensitive – a rush takes him down, an explosion dropping over somewhere near enough that the blast hits them. He tries to stand up from the floor again, only this time his foot is trapped by something that’s escaped the structure of the tent. He looks around for some help, but the bullets keep biting around them, their back up team – the ones supposed to be taking care of them while they virtually broke into the enemies’ lines – unable to fight back. It looks like hell, and he for sure feels like he’s entered Dante’s inferno.

The explosions keep coming their way, and suddenly he hears in mute. He can’t really listen to Mason’s screams as she is taken under by something that looks suspiciously like a flying bomb – he should try better to describe what he is seeing in his mind, because that sounded unlikely a military term – and when he finally frees his foot from under the metallic structure of the tent and turns around, all he sees is Parsons’ disfigured face, covered in blood and missing half an ear. He wants to screech, he wants to crawl, he prays out of the blaze and the fear, but the back up team is being hunted down – as if they had been targeted while they were playing God with their enemy, and they hadn’t noticed. There’s little he can do now, out of trying to take a run further into the desert.

The hiss doesn’t take him by surprise this time, but the impact is none like the others. This time, it hits him square, doubling him over and lifting him from the ground. The filthy soil he lands back down onto welcomes him with a brief but solid _thud_ and for a second he doesn’t remember where he is or what he has been doing. For a second he is numb until the pain comes crashing down onto him in waves and he feels nausea rising up in his throat. One hand flies to his right leg, to feel something, _anything_ , only to come back up in front of his eyes covered in blood. He sees sparks behind his eyes, his vision blurring out and unfocused. The pain finally numbs him enough to allow him to close his eyes and drift into some kind of doze.

He never sees the helicopters hovering over. He never hears the sound of new team members firing their guns and fighting for them. He never feels the hands that sense his pulse and deem him alive enough to be saved, while Mason and Parsons are covered with blankets and sent home in a different flight. He doesn’t see the end of a battle he was never supposed to fight.

His last conscious thought, however, is to a blondish defying curl sticking out of a head bent down on a guitar, music playing in his ears as he drifts away into a silence that speaks volumes.

**four. las cosas que no pueden ser son todas las que he sido yo**

Losing his leg gave him a purpose. Alex is now sure of that. Had he not been in that particular place in that particular moment, he probably wouldn’t have concocted the plan that he designed during the long and lonely months he spent in different military hospitals across the world. 

His father took so much from him – his life, his innocence, his future, _Guerin_ – that losing a limb was the trigger to a break down. While he cried out his heart to his shrink, he knew something needed to be done. So he planned carefully every step of his journey, only to be faced with the truth when he first set foot back in Roswell and saw that curly hair outside the Airstream they had noticed for eviction.

Those eyes have been haunting him ever since.

He has tried to be a real human being for so long. He’s tried with all his heart to synch himself with the effortless ways of one Michael Guerin – to his carefree taking on life, to his smile – he has even tried to explain why he still feels seventeen whenever Guerin is around. He fails epically at the drive-in, and it is then that he realizes that he’s lost focus on the goal he wants to reach. A simple conversation with his father triggers the fear in him – that fear he’s been harboring since his teenage years – and sends him into a spiraling week of sleepless nights and over exertion. But it also gives him enough focus to wait for Jesse Manes one day outside his not-so-secret bunker and hit the daylights out of him.

He would have beaten him longer, but he is not the vengeful type – not yet. He’s been waiting for this moment for so long – the moment when he takes away everything his father has worked for, everything that robbed him of a childhood and transformed his father in the monster he’s become. 

What he finds out makes his insides turn, his stomach sick with knowledge he wishes he hadn’t dug out. He hears his father snicker behind him and it’s all he can do not to club him once again, this time for good.

So he sends Jesse Manes to Niger, and in the following weeks he dives into the myriad of documents his father has gathered for years – those years he should have been teaching him how to become a good human being and not another Airman. 

What he learns takes a collision course against what he feels.

One night he calls Kyle Valenti into the bunker, feeling that he somehow owes Kyle after that night back at the cabin – when they found Rosa was Kyle’s sister, where he had broken a wall and extracted something glowing. They talk over beers and share some quality time, trying to revamp a friendship that’s long lost. Alex cannot bring himself to like Kyle for what he’s become now, but he needs an ally, and Jim Valenti was in the secret Jesse Manes kept from everyone – that the aliens were amongst the Roswell citizens, in the form of Max, Michael and Isobel. Kyle seems the suitable option for this mission of finding out the truth, but Alex knows he is keeping something to himself, and that’s why he can’t trust Kyle, not yet.

Not when they need to be open and trust each other – but he feels he can’t trust anyone, not after what happened in Iraq, not without giving too much of himself and he is not ready to admit that his feelings for Guerin haven’t waned with time. Not when he is not ready to share that specific tidbit of personal information with the one guy who made his high school experience a living hell for being openly gay. Even if he’s changed over the years.

What he’s good at, he does. He gathers all the information he can from his father’s files and orders it neatly after cutting all access to anyone who’s not himself. He peruses through the images, the reports, until he finds every little detail of Guerin’s criminal record – labeled red threat, just the same as the terrorists he hunted down back in Afghanistan or in Iraq – and with a swift flick of his right pinky he erases it for eternity.

There’s only so much he can do to protect Guerin from his father’s wrath, because he is sure Jesse Manes will be furious when he returns. Alex is not stupid – he knows his father will come back and he will try his hand at destroying them.

This time, he wants to be as ready to bite back as possible.

For six weeks, he manages to avoid Guerin altogether, which isn’t really that difficult given that the only place he’s seen these days is the Wild Pony, and most nights he leaves early to go God knows where. Alex doesn’t ask what he doesn’t want to know, and it’s not as if he can go to Maria and openly ask about Guerin without raising suspicions. So he comes in the Pony once or twice a week, in the hopes that Guerin isn’t around, has a beer and heads back to his cabin to fruitlessly study the piece of alien technology he’s found inside a wall.

He isn’t ready to admit that maybe his father is right and there are aliens living in Roswell. He isn’t ready to accept that said aliens have grown up with him.

He just can’t wrap his head around the fact that Michael Guerin might be one of them.

He just wants so desperately to believe he knows better, but the truth is that he doesn’t know Guerin at all, other than his body outside down and that sidereal connection they share from the first moment they shared.

For weeks he’s been lucky enough to not have crossed paths with Guerin, but tonight he runs out of luck and the cowboy himself patches his hat on the seat next to him at the Wild Pony. Alex huffs, throwing some bills onto the bar, filing for the exit when Guerin stops him. Alex doesn’t know what he had expected out of tonight, but it surely wasn’t the other man pleading for an ending of sorts – begging for closure or a follow up. He isn’t sure.

He thinks Guerin doesn’t know either.

But the world can indeed end with a whimper. Only theirs has just come to a halt – not a full stop – and Alex finds himself secretly wanting it to start turning once again.

A quick conversation with Kyle after learning what this girl from the Sheriff’s office has to tell them, and Alex is all set into war mode. He shifts his weight from one leg to the other, prosthetic in place and no crutch in sight, but he can’t mask the pain he feels whenever Kyle calls Guerin by his name. And it breaks him every time, not being able to pronounce it himself for fear it might awaken past ghosts.

But Kyle knows – somehow, he’s _always_ known – and points him in the right direction. But Alex doesn’t really feel at ease with the idea of plunging into another war unprepared, so he nurses a new bottle of beer once Kyle has left the bunker before heading up and right into a new form of torture.

**five. yo solo soy el que llegó, y el que se fue**

He would have preferred the punches to the cruel reality he has just learnt. Alex is staring at the fire in his foyer, back at his cabin – Jim Valenti’s old cabin – while the events of the whole day replay in his mind over and over, hurting him in all the right places, whether he might allow them or not.

Unsurprisingly, everything that has to do with Guerin breaks him even more with each little earth-shattering truth – he’s slept with Maria, he is an alien, he can move stuff around with his mind, he is a genius, he is building a spaceship to leave the fucking planet. Oh, who is he trying to fool anymore? The fact that Guerin has spent a larger part of his life searching for a way to escape a place he has never felt welcome into is nagging at him – yet another nail to his already bruised soul.

Probably the final one.

Alex doesn’t have the strength to move his sorry ass from the bench to somewhere more comfortable, while his feet are brushing against the bag holding the missing piece for the puzzle Guerin’s made out of a spacecraft console, but that decision is made for him when he hears the rustle of a car idling outside the door. He swears he can sense someone hesitating outside the door before a raping knock breaks the nightly silence at around two in the morning. Whoever it is, Alex knows them both are going to regret it the following morning. 

“Alex, I know you’re in there,” comes strained Guerin’s voice. “I can see the flames flickering.”

He braces himself before replying, “you know your way in,” as matter-of-factly as he can without losing control over his voice. After all the events of the day, Alex doesn’t really care if Guerin is going to burst into his house without him opening the door. He knows his way with locks.

However, when the door is unlocked with no one ever touching it and Guerin stomps into Alex’s house, it isn’t the sight he has expected. Guerin is looking worse for wear than Alex had anticipated – stumbling into the living room, reeking of whiskey and what Alex oddly identifies as acetone, curls wild around his head like a halo, and eyes frantically searching for something but rather unfocused and watery. Alex rises to his feet sharply and says in a low voice, “What’s going on, Guerin? What are you doing here?”

Guerin lets out a laugh that sounds more like a bark, and shakes his head. “Why did you have to go and tell her that you knew we had slept together?” he all but slurs. “Why did you have to spill our history to her, when you’ve made it very clear I was your dirty little secret no one should never know about?”

“Guerin, you’re too drunk to be having any conversation right now. I don’t even want to know how you got here in the first place,” Alex tries to reason with him. “Why don’t you drop it and we can talk later in the morning when you’re not so wasted?”

“I know I’m wasted,” Guerin shouts, staggering a bit and almost toppling over himself. “That’s not what I came here to discuss, I wanted to,” but he trails off, gaze flickering from Alex’s face to the bag that still rests at his feet, by the bench.

When Alex realizes what’s going on – his biggest mistake up until now, and that’s a lot to say – it’s too late and Michael’s demeanor has changed from loose and drunk to highly focused and raged in one second. “What the hell?” Guerin spits as he strolls down the living room and snatches the bag from under Alex’s bench, opening it all the way and revealing the glowing missing piece of alien technology that Alex has been so keen on hiding. “Have you had this all the time?” Guerin’s control feels like slipping, if the glass on the table and the stack of wood by the hearth already tilting with unraveling energy are anything to go by.

He remains silent, staring at Guerin as if he could burn holes into his soul, quiet while his place is getting trashed by a really angry alien, who’s making a hell out of his living room instead of talking to him. But then, they have never been really good at talking – they are good at biting and niping, at picking fights and leaving marks – but they are not friends.

Alex wants to smack himself as he realizes that they are both angry and desperate for all the same wrong reasons – they are both scared of the other walking away, dismissing their feelings once and again until all that’s left is the rage floating around his cabin along with his furniture.

“Guerin, please calm down and let me explain,” he finally whispers. 

“I don’t need your fucking explanation!” he explodes, the windows quivering under his wrath. “First you want us to be secret, I went along with it. Then you let your father get into your head and fucking break my _heart_ , and I went along with that too even if it hurt like fucking hell. And after that you even have the nerve to finish whatever was going on between us only to come back and bit my ass about being an alien, and you freak out when I show you my own secret! I’ve trusted you with my life, you’ve walked away yet once again, and when I come back to you because you’ve managed to fuck up the only good friendship I’ve had in the past ten years, I find out you’ve known all along! Why? Why’d you keep this from me?”

It is a tirade longer than anything Alex has ever heard come out of Guerin’s mouth, and the effort takes its toll as he watches the man – the _alien_ – exhaling a shaky breath, all drunkenness forgotten. “I just can’t, right now,” he whispers. “I can’t be friends with you.”

Guerin closes his eyes, clutching the piece tighter, and the glass stomps back onto the table with a loud thud. With a huff, he looks one last time to Alex before making his way out, leaving the door open but a trail of heartbreak where once stood Alex’s hopes.

**plus one. lo invisible existe sólo porque no se ve**

The more he thinks about their current predicament, the less he understands how they’ve all gotten into it. Alex was just trying to help a friend find some solace and peace of mind, and Valenti has decided that they couldn’t go alone into warzone, so his first option was to enlist Michael Guerin for a trip to Middle of Nowhere, Colorado. Not Max Evans, not even that girl from the Sheriff’s office – Jenna Cameron – by whom Valenti seems to be infatuated.

Michael _fucking_ Guerin.

If things weren’t bound to get weird by the time the three of them hit the road, it surely are now that they are astray in Trinidad on their way back, after finding literally nothing of what they were searching for up at Caulfield Prison, Valenti nowhere to be seen after fleeing to lick his wounds probably at the nearest bar, and the two of them sitting in spitting silence looking up at the stars.

The motel they’re staying the night in is revolting, so Alex has stepped outside his room only to find Guerin already out, seated on the back of Alex’s car staring at the stars. It had only seemed suitable to join him, and so he did, and now they are both trying to ignore the big pink elephant in the non-existent room.

Thoughts are racing in his mind, of other times, other moments, other lives, when they were young and owned the world, before the world chewed on them and spat them in two different universes, only to keep them close enough to reach out but far enough to never be together.

“I never meant to hurt you,” Alex starts, only to be cut off when Guerin says at the same time, “I shouldn’t have raged out like that.”

They both stare at each other for a second before huffing out a laugh. Alex can’t believe they’re still so in synch, even after everything they’ve been through – the abuse, the violence, the war – but the laughter dies in his lips when he takes the moment to _actually_ look at Guerin.

Although he doesn’t seem so winded up like the last time they saw each other, Guerin looks like he hasn’t slept in _eons_ , dark circles under his eyes, bags threatening to take over his face, and a grimacing pasted smile crossing his face. Alex takes a step closer, cautious, until he is almost face to face with him, the closeness helping him outline the stubble from that jaw he knows by heart with his fingertips – the same fingertips that are now itching to touch, to _feel_.

He doesn’t allow them to, however.

“Have you been sleeping?” he asks stupidly. He can almost see Guerin rolling his eyes in the dim light of the starry night.

“Not really,” Guerin sighs, and it throws Alex to another moment in time, and it still kills him.

“You must be working really hard to get your spacecraft ready to leave Earth and find home,” Alex deadpans, and he regrets saying the words the moment they escape his mouth. It’s not something he wants to talk about, yet he has managed to bring it up without hesitation.

“Is that what you think?” Something in that tiny thread of voice breaks Alex’s heart. He averts his eyes from the blurriness in Guerin’s, the emotions playing out like a well-tuned guitar. He doesn’t think he will ever get over the fact that he can read Guerin – _Michael_ – so well it destroys him. “You really think – know what? Never mind, Manes, it’s not your fucking business.”

His left hand brushes through his locks and it’s all Alex can do not to stare into it – the mangled bones, the scarred tissue, the awkward angle of the fingers. It is overwhelming, knowing he is to blame for that, for everything that’s been going on for the past decade, because he’s been so scared of just being _himself_ that he’s forgotten how to. He closes his eyes for a brief moment and exhales.

When he opens them again, Michael is still standing there, stubbornly staring up at the stars as if they hold all the secrets in the universe. And it’s in that moment that Alex realizes he’s already switched names in his head – _never again Guerin_ – that he is aware this is the only war he wants to plunge head first into. So he goes for the fall, not really caring anymore if he loses another piece of himself in the process.

He’s tired of fighting back when all he wants to do is move forward – with Michael.

“You know,” he starts, eliciting a startled shiver out of Michael. “I went to war and saw terrible things being done to people, and yet all my nightmares are still of _you_ getting hurt.” When his counterpart doesn’t reply, he goes off in rambling stutters. “I really didn’t want to go, but I had no choice. And still I liked it out there. I found purpose. But I wasn’t whole, and I didn’t want to acknowledge why it was that way. Until I came back and saw you here, stalling. I know I’ve made mistakes, I know I’ve stepped over your feelings time and again, I know I deserve the hurting I’m getting right now, but I never thought, not for a second. I never thought you would leave. You would leave _me_.”

He is tired of secrets, he’s tired of misunderstandings and mistakes. If Alex has learned anything in his years at war, it has been that there is only right now and right here, and he’s been really indulgent in his quest to remain true to what he wants. He promised himself he’d stay focused – not so long ago, when his world stopped spinning and then began turning at a higher revolution – and somehow he’s managed to lose himself and Michael in the process of hardening his heart for the confrontation with his father – his own war with life.

Michael keeps looking obstinately at the stars, but Alex can see a tear finding its way down those emaciated cheeks. It’s a reflex what has Alex’s hand up reaching to brush it away, a shaky fingertip tracing a pattern against Michael’s skin. He leaves a hot spot in his finger’s wake, but he doesn’t withdraw. Michael’s sharp intake of air makes him tremble, and all Alex wants to do is take him in his arms and kiss his fears away.

Instead, he remains still, his hand moving to cup Michael’s face, fingers lacing around wild curls. He waits in a feeble attempt to give a resemblance of tranquility when he feels goosebumps and dread at equals parts.

It seems like a lifetime until Michael lowers his head and looks square into Alex’s eyes. And then, it’s like an explosion of stars around them, the intensity of what Alex feels matching the emotions Michael is revealing in his gaze. “I could never,” Michael whispers, breath shaky. “I could never leave you. I never knew why, but now I know.”

“Is it because what we have is cosmic?” Alex asks shyly, that word echoing in his mind ever since Michael pronounced it, rolling oddly in his tongue. 

“Not at all,” Michael reassures him, this time turning fully to face him, a hand going up to cover Alex’s on his curls, the other resting on Alex’s hip to steer him in place. 

“Then why?” And his voice sounds so small, so stretched, but he still needs to know, because there’s no way Michael is thinking about staying if it weren’t for something _at least_ as good as _cosmic_.

Alex isn’t sure whether he wants an answer, but he senses he’s getting one anyway.

“I can’t go over to the stars to search for a home that isn’t up there,” Michael whispers as he leans over, hovering above Alex like a shadow casting dark against his skin. “I didn’t know back then, but I know now. Home is right here. Home is wherever you are, Alex.” Michael reaches him with his soul, and all of a sudden their foreheads are touching, the strife and the love coursing through Alex to Michael and back.

There are no fireworks, no ground-shattering trembling, but Alex feels his whole world turn upside down, inside out, and back to its hinges, completely aware of the heat of Michael’s hand gripping his hip, of broken fingers ghostling over trapped curls. 

They remain still, breathing in, until dawn breaks.

**Author's Note:**

>  **TRANSLATIONS:**  
>  _entre la espada y la pared_ ~ between a rock and a hard place  
>  _aunque me estrelle entre las rocas_ ~ although i crash against the rocks  
>  _lo contrario de vivir es no arriesgarse_ ~ the opposite to living is not daring  
>  _quizás podamos ver el sol de vez en cuando_ ~ maybe we could see the sun from time to time  
>  _sin dormirme te soñé_ ~ without falling asleep i dreamt of you  
>  _las cosas que no pueden ser son todas las que he sido yo_ ~ the things that cannot be are all i have been  
>  _yo solo soy el que llegó, y el que se fue_ ~ i am just the one who came, the one who left  
>  _lo invisible existe sólo porque no se ve_ ~ the invisible exists only because it’s not seen


End file.
